Email service moan

lindsay

lindsay

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I've got a number of web domains with 123-reg, each having email and in two cases three separate email addresses/users. I've been using these happily for years, then late last year they changed their server setup to use a generic server address for all email services (imap/smtp/pop3) with the email address and password being the access to the right domain. That took some reconfiguring of my mail clients, but not difficult and was done, and has been working fine for about 4-5 months. Then yesterday mid-morning, having used several of the email addresses already in the morning to send mail successfully, I could no longer send mail from any of my email addresses hosted by 123-reg. After various tests, I logged a support ticket, but their only answer ois to try to get me to sign up for O365 full services at £15.99+vat a month per user. That is completely over the top and unnecessary. I've tried to persuade them to fix whatever they changed yesterday morning, but they don't want to answer that question. So I'm starting the painful process of migrating 4 domains and 8 email addresses to other service providers, although I will rationalise this to get rid of one domain most likely, carrying 3 email addresses. But what a royal PITA. All on a couple of days when I'm trying to finalise a house completion date, removals and some important work stuff too!

Anyone else use 123-reg? They've been pretty ok in the past but I'm really angered by this approach.
 
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lindsay said:
I've got a number of web domains with 123-reg, each having email and in two cases three separate email addresses/users. I've been using these happily for years, then late last year they changed their server setup to use a generic server address for all email services (imap/smtp/pop3) with the email address and password being the access to the right domain. That took some reconfiguring of my mail clients, but not difficult and was done, and has been working fine for about 4-5 months. Then yesterday mid-morning, having used several of the email addresses already in the morning to send mail successfully, I could no longer send mail from any of my email addresses hosted by 123-reg. After various tests, I logged a support ticket, but their only answer ois to try to get me to sign up for O365 full services at £15.99+vat a month per user. That is completely over the top and unnecessary. I've tried to persuade them to fix whatever they changed yesterday morning, but they don't want to answer that question. So I'm starting the painful process of migrating 4 domains and 8 email addresses to other service providers, although I will rationalise this to get rid of one domain most likely, carrying 3 email addresses. But what a royal PITA. All on a couple of days when I'm trying to finalise a house completion date, removals and some important work stuff too!

Anyone else use 123-reg? They've been pretty ok in the past but I'm really angered by this approach.
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Fasthosts use the same setup, with a single server for all their domains.
Most of the time it works well, but I do get periods when one or more addresses refuse connections, and over Christmas they retired an old mail product (which several of my emails had originally been on, but most had migrated from) and automatically migrated any addresses on the old system to a newer product.
Unfortunately something went wrong and for about 2 weeks their server would resend old, deleted emails - some going back several years. My daughter who handles all email on her phone suddenly had 10,000+ 'new' emails, and they would reappear as fast as she could delete them...
All working properly again now, but was a right PITA when it was ongoing.
 
Interesting. I'm now gradually moving my domains and email accounts to new servers/hosts, to take away the single point of failure problem at least. I'm gradually working through changing some accounts with companies so that I can get rid of one domain and set of email addresses too. I guess I should have had a tidy-up ages ago!
 
I'd sign up with IONOS and get a Virtual Private Server. They don't cost much and you can host as many domains as you like on them.

You'll have your own mail servers and as many email address as you want.

www.ionos.co.uk

VPS Hosting UK | Cheap » from £1/mth | IONOS

Virtual Server Hosting in the UK » Unlimited traffic up to 1 Gbit/s ✓ SSD NVMe storage ✓ Free Plesk Web Host Edition ✓
www.ionos.co.uk www.ionos.co.uk

You will need to know a bit about setting it all up though as it's not a out of the box and it just works setup
 
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That does look like an interesting and cost-effective solution, though I know nothing about setting something like that up - I think I'd be asking our buddy sirch to do the admin for me! (joking, Chris). I'll think about it though.
Strangely enough, after transferring one of my domains to a different registrar this afternoon and having a moan to their support, my emails all suddenly started working this evening. Curious.
 
I have been with 1&1/Ionos since 2023, and have been relatively good in the past.
They have upped their prices over the last couple of years (They do it in a very sneaky way),
I have ditched 10 domains that I could, but still have a lot and many email addresses on them.
However, I have made changes, backups of sites etc and am now setup to change hosting companies without too much pain.

They have developed a very poor attitude, keep trying to sell you services you don't want or need, started charging me £7 a month for support I didn't ask for, need or authorise, and put up a mighty fight refusing to refund, eventually just suddenly refunding. (I hadn't even fallen into one of their slyly designed click traps, which they have also reduced now)

I think the hosting companies "Christmas" came to an end a couple of years ago, and their growth has outstripped their support, and things are now costing them more money than they expected.

I have been told by several still in IT that https://www.hostinger.co.uk is a good bet at the moment.
 
I have at least one domain with 123-reg (I just can't remember) , and fingers crossed haven't had any problems so far. I just hope it continues that way..........

I'll keep my eye on this thread to see how others have dealt with this problem in case it happens to me!
 
I have noticed that as this industry has matured, the more substantial and longer-standing members of it have been having to find add-ons and extra features to charge for to make their businesses viable and to grown them. It was fine early on when they were just selling domains and low-volume hosting packages, but there's a lot more competition now for cloud hosting and the hosting of the vast numbers of blogging sites. 123 has been largely good on service and support, but this latest episode has annoyed me. On the other hand it's now working so I'll just take the time to rationalise my online service needs etc and so like Steve says above, get myself into a better position to easily migrate. I may too learn what's needed to be able to go down the ops route recommended by Elliot
 
Something to bear in mind is that gmail and btinternet, as the main ones, have recently required more security checks on incoming emails. To reduce spam, supposedly. This carries an amount of irony, given that most of my spam comes from gmail addresses. I think it is a concerted effort by them to make other email hosting a pita and get more people to switch to gmail etc.
 
Yes, I get loads of bad spam on my old btinternet account, which I don't use except for receiving a few legacy things that I haven't bothered to change.
 
i run a vps to host my own email and domains however i have always had an issue with outbound email deliverability - i have used AWS (amazon web services) SES (simple email service) for the last few months for outbound email and it seems to work very well - it's free for 12 months then a very low cost per email/mb after that
 
I've decided to migrate all my current email addresses to aliases of my iCloud one, to rationalise them and get away from these issues of ISP's trying to sucker me into Microsoft subscriptions. I pay for 50Gb of iCloud storage anyway, and am unlikely in any foreseeable timeframe to move away from Apple infrastructure, so this will work for me and save me a fair few quid.
 
I've used 123-reg for ages but not their own email service. I use the dns facility and set it to an independent provider. I'm with Zoho at the moment and they've done ok. They have a lot of security and spam controls.
 
lindsay said:
I've decided to migrate all my current email addresses to aliases of my iCloud one, to rationalise them and get away from these issues of ISP's trying to sucker me into Microsoft subscriptions. I pay for 50Gb of iCloud storage anyway, and am unlikely in any foreseeable timeframe to move away from Apple infrastructure, so this will work for me and save me a fair few quid.
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Be interested in learning the process of doing this. I have my domain and therefore email addresses with Plusnet, and whilst I am happy with it, it's always in the back of my mind that I may want or need to move providers at some point. Like you, I have iCloud.
 
Update regarding using iCloud/iCloud+: this facility works by allowing you to create aliases of your primary appleid email address. You can send and receive using the alias email addresses but all mail arrives in the one mailbox and if you want to separate them, you need to manually create folders and move mail into them. Additionally, you can port an owned-domain email into iCloud. I did this by setting various DNS parameters as per instructions, so that my email for that domain comes into my iCloud email, but it is evidently just another alias albeit using a non-icloud domain name.
So the upshot is that this is a sort-of solution but not much different to using aliases in an exchange server email service, but it's free by virtue of already having iCloud and/or paying for additional iCloud storage so having iCloud+. It may suit some people but is a significant compromise, like the exchange offer from ISP's is. I will probably go with this though myself as I was looking to simplify my arrangements and don't really need to maintain multiple domains any more for business.
 
lindsay said:
I've decided to migrate all my current email addresses to aliases of my iCloud one, to rationalise them and get away from these issues of ISP's trying to sucker me into Microsoft subscriptions. I pay for 50Gb of iCloud storage anyway, and am unlikely in any foreseeable timeframe to move away from Apple infrastructure, so this will work for me and save me a fair few quid.
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This was the solution I had settled on when Google decided to can the grandfathered free Google Apps accounts. Fortunately, they reversed their decision before I needed to move too much over.

I use it for a few lower-priority domains, and my children's domains and it seems fine.
 
Sangoma said:
I have been with 1&1/Ionos since 2023, and have been relatively good in the past.
They have upped their prices over the last couple of years (They do it in a very sneaky way),
I have ditched 10 domains that I could, but still have a lot and many email addresses on them.
However, I have made changes, backups of sites etc and am now setup to change hosting companies without too much pain.

They have developed a very poor attitude, keep trying to sell you services you don't want or need, started charging me £7 a month for support I didn't ask for, need or authorise, and put up a mighty fight refusing to refund, eventually just suddenly refunding. (I hadn't even fallen into one of their slyly designed click traps, which they have also reduced now)

I think the hosting companies "Christmas" came to an end a couple of years ago, and their growth has outstripped their support, and things are now costing them more money than they expected.

I have been told by several still in IT that https://www.hostinger.co.uk is a good bet at the moment.
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Same here, I complained about the sneaky price rises and they reduced the monthly charge by about half.
I think I have unlimited web space and unlimited emails for £7.99/month now.
 
4wd said:
Same here, I complained about the sneaky price rises and they reduced the monthly charge by about half.
I think I have unlimited web space and unlimited emails for £7.99/month now.
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That is about a third of what I am paying!!!
 
I pretty happy with Webhostuk.co.uk good email hosting service using them from 13 years, good thing is no drastic rate changes with good service over the years.
 
mused said:
I pretty happy with Webhostuk.co.uk good email hosting service using them from 13 years, good thing is no drastic rate changes with good service over the years.
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They seem to have some very good value packages - I shall study them in detail later. Thanks for the mention
 
I run my own mail server (postfix + courier) in a debian VM on the R730 server which is a yard or so from my left foot at the moment, It is configured to relay outgoing mail through my ISP's customer facing smarthost and I have set up an appropriate SPF record, so have no deliverability problems.
 
lindsay said:
They seem to have some very good value packages - I shall study them in detail later. Thanks for the mention
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What did you do in the end?

I was with TSOHost who got swallowed up by 123reg who have already proven to be an absolute nightmare. I'm currently on a one month renewal just so I can migrate elsewhere. Looks like I need minimum 13gb, got one website, and one other domain redirecting to the co.uk plus the webmail which was something I missed since Friday and only just got access to today... thanks 123reg...
 
In the end I threatened 123-reg with leaving, moved one of my domains to another provider, and things miraculously got a lot better. However I'm slowly migrating my personal email to icloud accounts with a couple of domains moved there too (I can't remember how that works but it seemed to go ok). Thanks for reminding me of this thread though as I still need to do an audit of my domains and web hosting, so it could still be useful.
 
lindsay said:
In the end I threatened 123-reg with leaving, moved one of my domains to another provider, and things miraculously got a lot better. However I'm slowly migrating my personal email to icloud accounts with a couple of domains moved there too (I can't remember how that works but it seemed to go ok). Thanks for reminding me of this thread though as I still need to do an audit of my domains and web hosting, so it could still be useful.
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No worries, just shopping around and came across your thread!
 
I have been with Hostinger a few months now, everything smooth and fast, and easy to manage, a HUGE improvement over Ionos!!!
 
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